Managers' email: beyond tasks and to-dos

In this paper, we describe preliminary findings that indicate that managers and non-mangers think about their email differently. We asked three research managers and three research non-managers to sort about 250 of their own email messages into categories that "would help them to manage their work." Our analyses indicate that managers create more categories and a more differentiated category structure than non-managers. Our data also suggest that managers create "relationship-oriented" categories more often than non-managers. These results are relevant to research on "email overload" that has highlighted the use of email for activities beyond communication. In particular, our findings suggest that too strong a focus on task management may be incomplete, and that a user's organizational role has an impact on their conceptualization and likely use of email. Author Keywords Managers; relationship; task and contact management. ACM Classification Keywords...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Catalina Danis, Wendy A. Kellogg, Tessa A. Lau, Mark Dredze, Jeffrey Stylos, Nicholas Kushmerick
• Keywords: ACM Classification Keywords, Author Keywords Managers, CHI 2005, Human Computer Interaction, Research Managers